


Coming in from the Cold

by Ladyofwarandmercy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 22:54:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2405918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladyofwarandmercy/pseuds/Ladyofwarandmercy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Grant Ward shot Garrett, but covered his tracks and stayed with HYDRA as an inside mole, feeding info to Skye. Some bad intelligence ends up with Skye captured by HYDRA, and Grant captured by the rest of the Team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coming in from the Cold

“Well, as they say, look what the cat dragged in.” The bag was removed from Ward’s head. From what he could see, he was in a very familiar cell, down to the whining of the engines. May tossed the bag in a corner, near a tile Ward could tell was still loose. Coulson got in Ward’s face. “You, sir, are NOT an acceptable trade for Skye. But at least we can…debrief you.” Trip’s arms were folded, a look of disgust on his face. “We ought to toss him out the cargo bay door without a parachute.” He turned to Simmons, and jutted his chin up as he continued. “Might spare Skye the agony when we get her back, help her to move on and all that.” Even Simmons, normally squeamish about such things, had a hard, cold look on her face, as she chimed in, “We have tried to help her move on from you. I’m setting Skye up with a cousin of mine in two weeks. She doesn’t need you back in her life, after everything you did.”

Grant Ward took a deep breath, looked Coulson square in the eye, smiled crookedly, and said, “Jemma would not have called in her cousin if any of the other guys you have thrown at her had worked out in any way. Skye is faithful to me. Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder why?” He looked at May and Trip over to his right. “Wasn’t catching me just a tad too easy?” He got dirty looks from all around the room. Fitz was on a slow boil that was beyond words. Grant put his shackled hands on the table and opened his palms. “I’m BOOMER.” The only two who seemed to react were (expectedly) Coulson, and (unexpectedly) Fitz. Fitz started fiddling with his tablet. Coulson’s calm was shattered. “BOOMER is why Skye is currently God-knows-where in Bangkok, held by HYDRA. BOOMER gave us some good hints, right up until today. Hell, I _can_ believe you are BOOMER.” Now it was Ward’s turn to lose his cool. “It’s called a Barium Meal Test, Phil. Do you think I would have done anything to put Skye in danger? Doesn’t it sound like HYDRA to ensure their little canary trap puts in danger the one person I have been trying to protect? I’m coming in from the cold, Phil.” 

A pause was interrupted by Simmons. “Excuse me, I am familiar with barium meal, but what does barium nitrate have to do with anything? I mean, we don’t even use it to image the gut anymore.” May deadpanned, “It’s like the Canary Trap in Tom Clancy novels. Like a Barium Meal Test in medicine uses a meal of barium nitrate to reveal problems in the digestive tract, the tradecraft definition of the Barium Meal is disinformation fed to a suspected double agent. The hope is that the double agent will reveal himself by acting on the information, or passing it on to the enemy. It is plausible that Ward here decided once things went south in Burma, that he had been ‘made,’ and decided he was safer with us than with HYDRA.” Ward nodded as if to confirm this, but May continued. “However, it is also plausible that Ward here (did she have to use his last name like that?) has been tasked with finding out who the mole within HYDRA really is. And a sob story like his would be just believable enough that we’d trust him again.” 

Ward sighed, as if he expected this. “Guys, I wish to Hell I could show you when I shot Garrett-“ Coulson interrupted, “ _Skye_ shot Garrett!” Grant Ward grinned like a Cheshire Cat. “No, _I_ shot Garrett when he ordered me to kill Skye. I did it sloppy, like I never would do normally. I finished him off when he was on the ground, but I did it bent low, like at her height. My boots were clean, but she had stepped in an oil slick, thank God. So all I had to do was straighten Garrett’s shirt, have Skye put her boot print on his chest, shoot me in the shoulder and knee so that I could keep my cover, then kill the camera.”  
Fitz, who had been silent up until that point, cleared his throat. “It is a plausible narration of the events on the hard drive.” Everybody turned to look at Fitz with looks of curiosity, except for Ward, who looked like a man spared a hanging. “You have the hard drive, Fitz? I thought she shot the Hell out of it.” Simmons cocked an eyebrow at Fitz. “NELSON?” Fitz nodded. “ yes, NELSON. I figured it was about as destroyed a hard drive as I could find, so I used the hard drive from the destroyed camera where Garrett was shot as a way to test out NELSON’s capabilities—it’s a code name for a data recovery project of mine,” Fitz explained. Ward relaxed and smiled. “Fitz, I owe you two six-packs of Weihenstephaner. You are one of my favorite people in the world.” Fitz shook his head. “Skull Splitter, mate. Americans drink too German for my tastes. I have little audio, and only intermittent video, but I clearly see Grant here shooting Garrett, so that fits.” With a tap of his fingers, a holographic grainy video projected on the cell’s table showed Ward turning a gun away from Skye and towards Garrett. Silently, Garret dropped his gun and fell to the floor. A skip in the video, and the little Ward in the hologram was pointing at Garrett’s body, directing Skye to place her foot on the chest. Then a conversation happened where Ward was tapping his shoulder, and then his knee—both of which the little Skye shot. A pained Ward was still talking with Skye, gesturing her away. Audio kicked in, a bit loudly---“Call me BOOMER, like that robot woman on the show. I’ll be in touch.” Another gap in video, and Skye was getting up from where she was kneeling next to Ward, turned, and shot at the camera.

“The story is…not inconsistent” Coulson admitted. “I’m not going to say your story is the unvarnished truth. I’m not prepared for that. I can’t trust you in the field as of yet. When we touch down in Bangkok, you’re staying on the bus, Grant.” “Now hold on Phil,” Triplett interrupted, “Assuming the worst case, here, who is going to stay behind to babysit this guy? You? Me? Melinda? Smiley here is going to make short work of anybody else. He probably has figured out how to escape this cell whenever he wants.” Ward had to nod at that. It was the truth. Jemma shook her head, and held up a scanner with one hand, and a hypodermic needle with the other. “Not a problem for me, once I find and disarm his counter-toxin implant. Mister Succynlcholine and Miss Propofol would keep him nice and not able to kill me.” Ward cringed, but had to agree. As much as he ached to be personally sure Skye was safe, the team had no reason to trust him, and he was better off knocked out. 

Grant Ward woke up groggy, with a sore throat, pounding head, and what felt like the worst hangover of his life. He could feel the burns on his chest from what seemed to be the aftereffects of a defibrillator. He felt as if he were still drugged, and as if every part of him were on fire. This wasn’t supposed to be what it felt like to simply be knocked out. His left hand was cold against the bed railing, but his right hand was warm. Willing himself to turn and look, he saw Skye, with patches on her own wounds, asleep in the chair next to his bed, holding his warm right hand. It was enough. Ward went back to sleep. When he woke up again, Skye was gone., but the feeling something happened besides a simple knockout was still there. His agitation must have registered somewhere, because Fitz burst through the door suddenly. “Relax, Skye’s just getting a shower and a change of bandages. She’s doing better than you are, but that’s not saying much.” Ward tried to say something like, “What happened?” Fitz ran a scanner over him, and told him. Apparently, Ward’s counter-toxin implant had some kind of HYDRA programming, which caused the implant to try and dump every counter-toxin in its arsenal at once when Jemma had tried to turn it off. And counter-toxins without toxins to counter were often themselves toxins. They had barely been able to remove the implant and keep Ward alive afterwards. “And that took my burning one of our throwaway cell phones to have Doctor Banner on the other line!” Fitz finished.

By that time, Skye was limping back in the room, followed by Simmons and Coulson. Simmons was a bit apologetic. “It seems the implant triggered because I tried to fix it to turn it off the easy way. It received a signal it had been missing before, and triggered the dump of all the countertoxins it had.” Coulson nodded, and continued, “The suicide implant Garrett had placed in Deathlok and some of his other catspaws would not have passed the SHIELD health exams unnoticed. But a countertox with some…special programming? A countertox is standard for many field agents, and even a few desk jobs, if they have something interesting going across those desks. One bit of data that got posted online by Romanov, put together with data from your implant, has given us all something nice. One bit of information you just gave us without opening your mouth, is a handy way we can tell the sheep from the goats. Anybody with your countertox model we can assume to be HYDRA. We need SHIELD more than ever now, and now we know a way we can rebuild with people we trust. Whether you tell us anything more is up to you…

**Author's Note:**

> "Canary Trap" has been the more popular term in pop culture for the Barium Meal Test, as Canary Trap was the term used by Tom Clancy in the novel _Patriot Games_. Canary Trap was used for a particular method of rooting out leaks by manipulating the wording of published information. HYDRA had given Grant plain old bad information that had led to Skye's capture, which makes Barium Meal Test the more appropriate term.


End file.
